My favorite blogger, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Yarn Harlot, has a marvelously Canadian expression: “arse it up” — meaning, to screw something up almost irretrievably. Now, when Stephanie does it and writes about it, it’s hilarious. As in, e-mail-your-friends-the-link, guffaw-so-loudly-your-spouse-thinks-you’re-choking, hold-your-gut hilarious. You Harlot readers, you know of what I speak. You know that roller-coaster-ride through McPhee’s mind as an insanely intricate sock falls off of her needles, or as she wonders how stupid and frivolous she’s going to sound on the radio as her interview for a knitting book follows a colon cancer expose. You know she is going to make you laugh so hard your abs will need Ben-Gay.

Last Sunday night, I knew the Harlot’s obsess-a-thon tendencies had taken up permanent residence in my own cranium. First there was the pre-obsess-a-thon, shopping for seed-starting equipment online, in friends’ basements and in local garden stores. Loose media or jiffy pots? Capillary matting or no? Shop lights from Home Depot or a real grow light in a fresh new box? And when the heck will I get the actual time to play with all the fun neon veggie seeds I’d collected and ordered and traded with friends?

Sunday night at least the time question got an answer. As the slow-cooker braised me a pork shank in tomatillo salsa, I unwrapped a 70-cell jiffy pot starting tray complete with capillary matting and got to work.

You know, there are 1,001 ways to obsess about putting some dang vegetable seeds into jiffy pots. Pop them in a bowl of water or let them expand on their own as I fill up the tray with water? Are they too dry or too wet? Will the little devils be warm enough? How many of each veggie should I start? Is the peaty stuff in the jiffy pots “fluffy” enough? Are the seeds deep enough? and have I forgotten what I was doing with which little pot and labeled the poblanos as parsley? When will they germinate? What if they germinate all at different times? Should I prop the clear plastic lid up when the first little sprouts come up or wait until more show their faces? Will I have enough room under this one enormous light rig once they’ve all got big enough to be repotted?

And, of course, most haunting and daunting of all, will I, at some critical moment yet to be revealed, completely arse this up and have it turn out to be a humiliating waste of time and money?

It’s a roller coaster, like any project. There’s the imagination phase, the forking-over-of-commitment-signifying-dollars phase, the asking-of-too-many-questions phase … to the point that if you don’t get a hold of yourself, the doing phase can get to be actually anticlimatic. Especially if you’ve been waiting on a five-pound pork shank to fall off the bone in a slow cooker so you can break for dinner. (Two crispy tacos to the rescue. Seeds require humidity; fighting off obsession requires crispy tacos).

Seventy jiffy pots is an awful lot of tenuous hope, an awful lot of messing about with “fluffing” the pots with a toothpick and then popping the tiny seeds into holes of a specified minuscule depth. But the grow light — which I am directed by seed-starting authorities (Bugbabe, you know who you are) to have ready and waiting for when the seeds pop their heads out — is now rigged. A little nearby heater is keeping the tiny, expensive little twits toasty. The plastic lid is constantly fogged up as if there’s some secret and illicit seed congress going on in there, and I can’t see inside unless I break into their private humidity preserve. I feel like the parent of naughty teenagers. It’s frustrating, the waiting.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.